• Wall Street Beat: Tech may be a bright spot in tough economy

  Tech stocks ended the first trading week of 2012 on an upbeat note even though both Forrester and Gartner this week forecast slowing growth in IT spending, due mainly to concerns about the global economy.

• Wall Street Beat: Tech stocks flat for year

  After a rollercoaster ride on the stock market, tech companies are ending the year just about where they started, despite strong and in some cases record sales and profits for IT bellwethers.

• Forrester to CIOs: End the Mac prohibition

  Forrester analyst David Johnson likes to compare Macs in the enterprise with the heady days of the Prohibition Act of 1920, the great thirst, stealthy bootlegging, and the rise of the speakeasy bar.

• Wall Street Beat: Software earnings look good

  The spectacle of Hewlett-Packard replacing CEO Leo Apotheker, who had been in the job just a year, with former eBay chief Meg Whitman this week all but obscured solid earnings reports from a range of enterprise software vendors including Oracle, Tibco and Red Hat.

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  Keep rogue Cloud software from making IT irrelevant

  Surveys of senior IT managers consistently show that Cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) are being tested or used for non-critical applications at fewer than half of U.S. corporations.

• Harness disruption or become obsolete: Forrester

  Five years ago, Nokia dominated the smartphone market. How quickly things change. But before you sit back and think, ‘that won’t happen to me’, take a look at the competitive environment in which your company operates. Daunting, isn’t it?

• 5 virtual desktop pitfalls

  Most CIOs have started considering virtual desktop infrastructure and other types of desktop virtualization, but only a minority has reached the deployment stage. (See related story, "As Windows 7 gains steam, VDI set to rise".) Virtual desktops can potentially provide more flexibility for users, make it easier to apply patches and reduce IT help desk calls, but there are still numerous problems that keep desktop pros up at night. Here are five pitfalls to watch out for.

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  Microsoft Office 2010 upgrades: Four pitfalls to avoid

  From training worries to compatibility woes, fears of business disruption can spread when IT announces a Microsoft Office 2010 upgrade. Here's how IT can steer clear of four big upgrade mistakes. Read on.